Distant voices

Yeats may have said of Synge that "a great poet is the antithetical self of his people, saying truths they have forgotten, bringing up from the depths what they would deny. He is the subconscious self", wrote Paul Muldoon, reviewing the second volume of RF Foster's life of Yeats in the Times; but, he added, quoting Foster, "as so often, he was talking... really about himself".

Muldoon gave full consideration to the difficulty of "making sense of Yeats", and concluded that Foster's was an "extraordinary achievement": "The Yeats who emerges from these pages is allowed to be haughty and humble, polemicist and priest, prig and profligate, arch-poet in the sense of 'first poet' but also in the sense of 'clever, cunning, crafty, roguish, waggish'."

The Times went early on the Yeats, and Foster will be thankful for the good notice; in his Guardian column last week John Sutherland used the imminent publication of Christopher Ricks's Dylan's Visions of Sin to tut-tut about the general tendency to review major books early: if negative (as they have been of Ricks), he said, "the labour of decades... [can be] dead on arrival". It was a prelude to Sutherland's own more gentle, if not quite rave review (also early) of Ricks's study of Bob Dylan in the Independent on Sunday.

He registered the book's failings ("[h]is text-centric approach skeletises Dylan's songs: reduces them to dry rattling bones"; he "largely ignores the troubled trajectory of Dylan's career") but praised Ricks's sheer "cleverness": "What this book represents is a collision [between Dylan and] the best reader of English poetry we have."

The Financial Times's Michael Church began the Letters and Diaries of Kathleen Ferrier "with some resistance" - he thought her "fans' adulation... over-the-top", her repertoire "prissy" - but "on closing it, with a terrible sadness, I'm a fan too." "The secret is her voice... the plain-speaking tone of a Lancashire lass who was also an aesthete, a joker and an exemplary friend." She can be "arch", said Church (" 'Klever Kaff' is a frequent comment on her exploits") - "but never self-important". Cancer grounded her. "Her final performance was punctuated by a dull crack as her cancerous femur broke in mid-aria, but she sang on, clinging to the scenery: 'Not so clever Kaff' was her unself-pitying comment, to her appalled and grief-stricken friends."